Gnutella

It was 2005 when Gnutella was the third largest file sharing protocol in the world. Even today, Gnutella maintains their rank as the third largest regardless of the fact that FastTrack has declined and the bit torrent protocol has taken over. Gnutella was first developed back in 2000 right after Nullsoft was bought out by American Online. When the program was finished, its release date was announced on Slashdot and the first day it was available, people swarmed the site to download he client applications which were open source.

Due to the fact that AOL now owned Nullsoft, the day after the public release, American Online stopped the project completely due to the possibilities of legal implications. Thanks to the fact that this was released as an open source program, that one day was all that was needed. Within a matter of weeks, the program was reverse engineered and re-released as open source clones. All maintaining the original protocol developed for the Gnutella network.

It was in 2001 when Napster was hit for legal issues, many people left Napster as soon as they found out and chose an alternative. The number one alternative they chose was to use the Gnutella cloned clients. It was because of these Napster refugees, that the Gnutella network discovered its weakness when the entire network began to bottleneck, but thanks to the newly developed FastTrack, Gnutella was redeveloped to include their ultrapeer protocol which prevented future bottlenecks in the network.

By 2001 and 2002 both LimeWire and Morpheus were using the open source Gnutella protocol in their networks as it allowed for a semi-centralized network versus the fulle decentralized bit torrent protocol.

The difference betweek Gnutella and the bit torrent protocol, is that when a client side node is booted up, it searches for ultrapeers. Ultrapeers are nodes that maintain the information of other clients in the network. Basically an Ultrapeer is a client that is never shut down and therefore has a complete list of nodes in the network. It will then try to connect to a certain number of these nodes in the network until it reaches its quota of connections.

Once it makes those connections and compiles it own list, it then takes over the position of the ultrapeer, but only to those node in which it is connected to. Basically a first come first serve basis. The fist node online helps the other nodes connect to each other. From there, in order to build up the database of files, one client would d a search. In this search function, their client contacts only the nodes that they are connected to requesting that file, the nodes it is connected to then forwards the search to the nodes in its connection. Eventually the search goes through the entire network and the number of available sources is slowly reported back to the requesting client application.

Gnutella has come a long way and still maintains its standings in the peer to peer file sharing networks. P2P is here to stay and it is not going anywhere, so regardless of the program and protocol you choose, you are bound to find what you want.

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